this is the first ai agent thing that has i been a mind blowing moment for me where i am not a programmer i am not a code but i can now create software what's that's insane there are apps bills on agents that otherwise would take probably hundred thousand dollars of developer time and you can build it like in you know twenty five dollars paid to rep it's pretty wild how fast these companies are scaling i don't think get into history of silicon valley we've seen anything like that even in like web two point know arr so what is like a fast ramp for an ai company what's impressive that kind of broke the frame of what how long things would take so i i would say reaching it's ten million in three to four months arr oh my god that's point can i ask a blunt crude question how can i use your software to become a billionaire there i would say building i feel like i could rule the world and i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days so on a road less travel never looking back okay so how do we wanna start this so i'm ji you you're awesome so you have your today in a position that i think a lot of people wanna be and you have you're doing the silicon value dream you had this idea you go through y you've now raised hundreds of millions of dollars you're valued at a you know billion dollar valuation so that's today but then the cool thing about your story is it that didn't seem likely you know ten years ago is a very unlikely success story and yeah you went through yc but you rejected a bunch of times like yeah you're in silicon valley now but you started off coding in an internet cafe in jordan that's what's interesting to me and that we asked you beforehand we're like hey what killer stories could you come on the podcast and tell and you go you wrote it so i'm gonna read a word for and then i want you to tell the story you go rejected four times and rick rolling into yc raising tons of money and meeting a amazing billionaires let's do the first part rejected four times and rick rolling into yc can you tell the story yeah so i left my job at at facebook in twenty twenty sixteen and you know rep has been a side project for a while and it's been it's been growing i've been working on it like nights and weekends it grew to to a point where the like server cost was meaningful and i was like okay you know i have to i guess i have to start a company around it and so i went to my manager at facebook and i was like look i have the side project can we make it like somehow a project at at at facebook and we looked into that i sent stuck an email the time and he he ignored me like okay i get i guess i have to start i guess i have to start a company and so yeah i quit i quit my job apply to i see the first time we did the whole thing we did the the form and the video and and all of that and we didn't even get a get a call or anything like that it was it was just like we got the rejection letter and so i was like okay you know i have this facebook stock some savings i sold the facebook stock i put like half of in bitcoin and then half of it into into the company or like just just for us to kind of live and how much money was that it's like seventy k or or something like that what was the original product for a rep so it was basically an editor and a console you could type code there and you can run it you can switch a language and that's it by the sam have you ever used rep i was using it today before this it's magical and also your tweets describing what it is like for example your doctor saying you know he wants me to track my sleep so i just uploaded the pdf that he wanted me to fill up fill out inter interrupt and it made an application so i can upload it much easier yeah it's like pretty magical sean are you able to use it it's definitely out of my league still both me and sam have joked around because we both have maybe five or six times full started of like i'm gonna learn to code this summer it's like a new year's resolution thing where you just keep saying you're gonna do it you you do twenty percent of it thirty percent of it in years to give up you know we buy the the u course learn python on the hard way then you start doing and that nothing really ever stuck one of the biggest problems was that nobody really talks about this do you think learning to code is like learning spanish it's like learning a language you're like okay so how do i need to say the thing but before you could even do that it's like oh i'm supposed to download this program so i need to download an editor and then i'm dialing need to download all these packages to be able to try stop and then you need to and it's like just setting up the environment is so goddamn confusing to a beginner that you don't even get to do the the part where you actually write the code yeah and and be able to and then say how do i run the code i host it somewhere i gotta learn how to do hosting it's sir i what is that and so there's all these things around that were confusing rep solved all of that which was amazing and i actually did your like hundred days of learning to code like it's actually made it really easy you know if i didn't have kids i would just be doing a lot more because it's you you solve that problem for me and i know i'm asking you about the yc rejection i wanna come back to that but to give sam maybe a little more of context i think correct me if i'm wrong maybe i'm making this up i think the reason you wanted to have this kinda like online editor online environment where it's all hosted there was because when you were younger you were living in jordan and it i guess you used to go try to learn to code out of or go try to code out of internet cafe but that means every time you go you have to set everything up for the first time because it's not your it's not your home base not your home computer where you set it up once and it's there is that true is that why you have you felt the problem like ten x what a normal pre person would feel yeah but basically like every time i wanted to do a little of homework i have to like spend an hour setting up the environment yeah at the time the web was moving so fast until we had google docs and we had gmail we had this you know client side javascript application sort of a evolution and i'm like okay you know why can't i type code into the browser and run it and i started looking around and turns out like nobody solved this problem there were some experiments and it it was kinda crazy to me because it was almost like you know finding a hundred dollar bill in new york grand central station right like it's like oh i found an idea that nobody's paying attention to and is that true because because it's kind of crazy you know the world's big lot there there's was a lot of programmers that seems like an obvious thing i mean i'm a total outsider so my question is like was there some technical challenge to that because that seems like i i i i guess it's ct to say things that are successful our obvious ideas looking back but like yeah well yeah seems like two things right there's the technical challenge of being able to make this all work in a browser right that that was that was not obvious but then there's it seems like the second thing was i keep going back to the internet cafe thing because it's sort of like the hardship made the problems like unavoidable to you right whereas as anybody else who learns to code if you're just doing it at home in america and or in your you might do that setting up once maybe of a little bit of the problem but you're not running into it face first every day as if you were if you were working out of internet cafe yeah absolutely right i mean you know program talks about it all the time it's like you know the best startups are you know solving your your own problem and i felt that problem really deeply and i started working on it i discovered why it's hard well it's it's hard to run different languages in the browser you can run javascript but you can run python for example so so we started writing interpreter writing compile to to to run on on javascript and then in you know it took us to a couple years had like few languages running it was like pretty rough prototype but people started using it my friends and people at school and i'm like okay this idea has legs and so let me work on it more and then twenty eleven had a breakthrough and the breakthrough was we were the first to compile python ruby a bunch your languages to javascript and run them straight the into the browser and that went super viral like so we open source that we put her up and like on hacker news and that was my first experience of like going viral and then or not which is i i was like oh my god this is this is like an amazing rush and i still feel that rush yeah if you put that in context for a non non engineer where is the thing you guys did is it on a scale of like one two satoshi na solving to like double spend problem like how hard of an invention was that was like the nerd analogy you ever could have came up with that's what i'm here for so like was it was it genius or was it just that nobody had taken an as much time as it would take to do that like where was that breakthrough what how do you how would you describe that breakthrough it it's definitely not on the order of like the double double spend problem aware it's like a fundamental in invention it was like you know pushing like a a huge rock bolt like up upper mountain it took so much grit and and just obsession to be able to hack the browser in order to run things that the browser wasn't supposed to run wasn't designed to run and and so i would say it is solving hundreds of problems as opposed to solving like you one one invention perfect per double sweat yeah so you you're working on it as a side project for a number of years that's a long time by the way sean can you imagine like having a side project that's a hobby that takes three hours a night with little i mean two do you for two years is kind of a long time no do the only two things i've ever done that with is this podcast and my kids and there's really no way out of the kids so you know in the podcast was a hit right away podcast gave results right away so it actually doesn't count you were doing this without the kind of like financial rewards or fame rewards or any other major rewards during that time how many years did you do the side project thing and what kept it going you know two thousand nine was the original idea twenty twenty eleven was the breakthrough and you know went viral on on on hacker news and and then not and i i think that was the first time i thought like a little bit of of fame a little bit of return on investment like i remember brendan dyke inventor javascript and was the cto at mozilla like tweeting about it i was like wow this is amazing like you know you know kid and jordan like made this like fundamental breakthrough and like you know bra or tac and like i'm getting this recognition that's pretty cool and also some articles wrote about it it was people talked about in conferences and so all that was evidence for my old one visa to come to the states basically my entire adult life i'm working in this which is crazy right like although you know i am thirty six wow i think and you know i well and just have you been work on this since your twenty twenty one i think yeah so anyone yeah that's a that's a while that's your whole life you're whole whole life and you know it it continued to like you know incrementally improve my life so it wasn't wasn't this you know working in a in a room for eleven years and and nothing happens so i get this visa to the united states and they go work at ko academy and they used the open source work that that that we did right in a bunch of companies in the us there was like a this boom and like moo if you remember that chris whatever and a lot of them used the open source version of apple to create interactive courses right and and and suddenly like the the world open up open up to me i'm getting job offers all over the place and i and have choices where to go and and so we decided to go into new york naval nevada has this great quote where he says people was asking about like you know how to build a great network or networking what are your tips for networking and it's like my only tip for networking is do something great and watch your network will appear overnight people will immediately come to you because you've done something right you didn't go try to get a coffee with brendan i you build something really cool that the creator of javascript with browser was like hey that's awesome i wanna reach out to know and i think that's actually how you back to the yc i think that's how you ended up getting into yc later was paul graham actually just thought what you were doing was cool but like let's go to the yc part so you you quit that facebook job half the money in bitcoin half the money in your startup up apply to yc rejected that was the first rejection what were the other rejections yeah if vcs kind of wouldn't wouldn't talk to us or you know we we'd get meetings with the vc some of them are like yawning and and i think if one of them slept and it it was just like not interesting to them dude i had that happen one time as well like a i guy a guy literally fell it was like he he was literally eighty and it was friday at four and it was warm in the office i he like fell asleep mid mid pitch like it was work yeah it was like a cold bay it was warm side so i was like yeah i mean like put him man but yeah i was like you i was like you deserve this dude what what what did they not seeing you because like it's so easy to be to look back in the past but like you seem like you got the factor that seems like such an obvious idea you weren't done it for two years smart people are talking about it like what were you what were you missing what was the case against it well i i i think you know silicon valley is like probably the most merit democratic place in the world but it is also status driven at least then it was very status driven like if you look at the white you know people who got in yc like with stanford drop and and things like that and i think since then why he has has has improved and you know gets international people and all of that but but but you know my background wasn't wasn't really interesting to to them you know i didn't have any fancy colleges or or any of that also being married couple was was somehow like something that that they thought it was a disadvantage you you you didn't match the patterns you didn't match the stanford pattern you didn't match the cofounder relationship pattern you didn't match the the trend of of of what categories have big exits you weren't on trend at that time right yeah and so continue to apply to yc every season of voice we'll we'll send in the the application and you know our thesis evolved more and we felt like we had started making some money some people started paying for our service we had an api at the time that people paid for a lot of educators and and people learning code started to to pay pay for rep what was the revenue when you got in like maybe tang grab them one mh it it was enough to sustain us at that at that point it was like the ramen profitability but before i see the the person who who actually the first one to battle was roy be from bloomberg beta so i knew him from my coat academy days and and it was such a the meeting with him was so refreshing like he he was like just a straight shooter he he would tell me like he here's where i think you know the idea or the category is is hard you know he here is where i think the valuation should be and it was like the first meeting he just gave me everything he was thinking about he didn't obscure anything and i was i was feeling really good about it and so yeah he gave us five hundred thousand dollars on a on a six million valuation so that was the first chuck we got nice and and and then how did the how did you eventually get into yc so basically you know we're grinding and and and and the product was getting better every every week and i started writing articles about while we're solving so okay so we're solving pretty hard problems and so this article kept going in hacker news and hacker news was really excited about what we're doing and pull grand reads hacker news a lot probably still to this day and one day like december twenty seventeen i wake up there's a dm on on my phone and it is sam alt and he's like hey i run yc c and we're interested in what you're doing i i'm like to dude i know who you are yes tell me runway see and he's like okay let's let's me you know come to this address and i wasn't the yc i was like a little confused and so i i go there and it was the open office in the in the mission and so i i meet him there and and you know we're talk a little bit and then he's like he turns his computer around he's like this is this paul's email he emailed sam and told him this this company is very important you should reach out to them and he's like okay talk to to pg i'm gonna give you his email talk to him and then maybe you can maybe we can work on something to get you into i see so i started this email relationship with with paul which was really fascinating i mean he he he's a great writer right and so we talked about we talked about rep load we talked about the the the the problems of setting up an environment the problems of hosting an application it turns out after he sold via web he started working on on something like rep he started working on like an editor you write some lisp of course because he like likes this this very obscure program languages and by the by the way program is the founder yc at the time he was starting to to retire and and sam was was running y he and and so you know we had this email or relationship where he he wrote me as essays essentially on on on the problem we're solving by the way were you were you intimidated you know program writing essays to you privately are you like is that high stakes replies there for you yes like i i would spend hours kind of profiting the the emails and i'm trying to like be at as good a writer as as like but you know one thing about me is like i was never like nervous about meeting like famous and established people and i think that helped me over time because like you know i can be myself and i like can talk to them at the same level as opposed to like being a fan boy or or yeah why why was that what what were you just oblivious to it or you just had a different mindset about it what what was the reason yeah i i i felt like my life was was taking on this trajectory that was not to be too super suspicious but like it was this force and and i felt like everything's is gonna be great and you know we're it's gonna be hard but you know i'm meeting all these people things are opening up to us and and so when when i go and and and meet people my mindset is like i wanna impress them and i wanna be able to you know get money from them or like i have a goal i think having a goal when you're when you're meeting someone i actually puts you in a very different mindset than than again like fan boy and and right i'm just being very excited about the meeting dude have you guys seen that do you guys know the director guy ritchie he's that like british director he's got this great story he was on some podcast somebody joe rogan and he was like you know i just wanna be the director of of my own life and i wanna live my life like a movie and what you're describing is sort of like that where you're like i just i am destined for greatness and like we are taking on this amazing problem and like we are going to do wonderful things and it will be hard but we will triumph off and i think that the that's actually great that's a great story to tell yourself and i think it's very motivating and it makes life more exciting i think that's really cool yeah so i i actually wrote a a blog post the title is do what makes the best story and and the idea is like when you're faced with decisions where there's no obvious answer like the a fork in the road where the pros and cons are sort of the same the heuristic i use in my life it's like what is a more interesting story and it obviously like elon talks about this like the the most the most entertaining outcome is is most likely yeah i wasn't not thinking about it in terms of entertaining but in terms of like what makes the story interesting if if my life was a movie what would what would be exciting about about that story you for example when when i was in college i was like coding all the time and i wasn't really going into class and so so i i was failing a lot not because i was filling the exam because you know they they would bar me from the exam because i wasn't showing up and and i decided to to hack the university to change my grades and we're not talking like metaphorically like a light no you actually hacked into the servers and changed your grade is that what happened yeah i i went into into the basement i spent like two weeks i did the was his name the famous inventor michael angelo or something like that i did his sleep poly sleep where you work four hours and then you sleep fifteen minutes and it it was it was sort of like i was riding on the wall i was like it was like a full on insanity were you angry what why did you decide to i know so many smart people who work so much harder to cheat or get around the thing than just doing the thing and and there's like a fifty percent of time and end up being like losers fifty percent of the time they are in fact like the greatest they're on this podcast yeah well i i think it is like some adhd right like you can't sit you can't sit in class but if you're interested in something you're gonna like hack and like work on at a ton right and i almost got away with it but the servers at the at the university crashed and it crashed on my record so the one of the administrators there gave me a call and he he said look there's like this there's someone anomaly in your in the in the record of your exam and and school and it's crashing our databases do you know anything about it and i was like what's the anomaly and he's like you know there there's a field in the database that says you're barred from the exam and your grade should be should be thirty five that's that's the default grade of of failing of the the exam and instead my grades were like you know seventy five ninety whatever so that's the that's what i entered the into there and i didn't understand that there was another field by the way that you know that that's not good good design for for a database and so it's so since then i i you know i had there was a fork in the road i could i could lie and i think i could get get away with it and you know and and just say like i that's a bug on your side and but i was like what's the most interesting story is they they catch me and it becomes a story that people talk about and and i was like okay i'm just gonna i'm just gonna like come and just tell them what i did so you you're better better than getting the grade would be getting the reputation yes exactly so you tell them and then what happened to kick you out no so you know i i'm kind of a convincing person so i i go the next day and it's like all the dean's there and they're discussing my case and they're like trying to find out what what i did and and they're all computer science dean i went in there and i changed the subject to technical aspects of the hack and i drew in the whiteboard and show them what i did and and all of that and they were very impressed it's like a goodwill hunting moment yeah and like my reputation back then is like i'm i'm a loser i'm failing everything right i don't show up to class and and it is it is kind of like good goodwill hunting and then you know i they say okay you have to go talk to the president because i think he he's gonna make the final call so i i go to to the president and and he's a very intellectual person and we talk and i you know i tell him like look you know i i have this talent and i feel like it was undiscovered and i feel like i was treated on unfairly and and i i used the the you know i used the university as my sandbox like i didn't like you know i came clean i didn't you know mean to to do anything anything bad and and and and he gave me the spider man line he's like with great power comes creators responsibility it and it it actually affected me and i was like okay you know i you know i think you know i you know i i i i need to do something in order to to to to kind of payback back and i i told them i'm gonna work this summer for free to to make sure i secure your your databases and so they they let me off the hook and the awesome yeah a lot of great story dude that is an amazing story saying by the way would you ever wanna compete with object at anything no this is like this mentality this is it's scary like yeah i would not want to you're like excuse me dean have you heard of the word prodigy you you're you're like you're like i my talents haven't been used well at this university i accept your apology dean girl all dude it was like why are you failing me yes yes that's so good okay so i love the principal do what makes the best story i love the hack story that's that's amazing we're we how did we get here we were talking about y why okay sorry let's get to the story i see yeah that's that's where we started okay so sam's like yeah you should do i see actually the batch starts tomorrow why don't you fill an application it's just a just a you know process you have to do i mean we can do it later in interview you tomorrow and i like fuck i wanna fill the application again like you made me do it like four times like i don't wanna do it again and so you know i i kind of do a bare bones application about about rep and then there's the video i don't like yeah man i don't wanna i don't wanna do the video so so i i pasted a youtube link and and then we go the next day hi anna i by the way for people who don't know yc application is like one page just like six or seven questions but then they say upload a video two hundred three minutes you're talking about your startup so that's the video part and then the interview is ten minutes where there's just rapid fire so you have like ten minutes and it's like this make or break thing it's less than a lunch you know like this less than a job interview with more intense so you're waiting around for that yeah i mean my view was they recruited us so i see like why are you making us do do do this stuff right and and so yeah i was gonna ask that like they're ask they're acted like you know paul like you know maybe i could pull some strings like i know a guy yeah like you're the guy so i yeah i don't understand what they're what what they're bullshit well i don't get it well i i think they they wanted to to just like go through the process it's like the process applies to everyone and i don't i respect that so you know they they they call us to to the interview and and i walk in and and there was jared and dora and and and all these amazing boise partners and there's was michael he was the ceo at the time and i shake their hands and i shake michael's hand and and i felt like his grip was was a little too hard i was like okay that's fine and then i i go sit down on the chair and and the moment i sit down micah looks at me why did you recall us oh my god and and of like you know we we applied several times and and i thought and it'd be fun to do and and you know i thought this this interview was just we're just you know formality and and and he's like that's not how you get into yc and he was he was very very angry well turns out when we're sitting outside though getting rolled inside right so say say imagine their mindset looking at the application and and and and getting the the the girl's sign and and then they give us a very tough interview in that moment did you it's like and that's when i realized i fucked up like did did you realize like yes how i'm coming across like when was your mindset there like they i was thinking i was nervous i was very nervous and i was regret immediately yeah because you probably it's like here's this entitled just another just another tech entitled guy when they don't know you're like immigrant from jordan who's like scraped his way here right they don't let reality and how you were coming across weren't connected in that moment no they weren't at all and and so and so i you know we go outside and and i tell hi okay this is done let's let's call in uber and get back to work like we don't have we don't need to get into yc so i call in uber and just before i arrive i received a call and and i i take the call and it's like hey it's dora you got come back the the the kick off is about to start i was like what are you sure it's just like yeah come back sign sign the paperwork and get started so i was stunned the whole day like it was you know we start we go to the dinner and i'm like you know you know phased out and and and all but like it was really exciting and you know people who who who's never been to the yc office and and mountain view it's all orange like bright orange and and the lights and everything it feels in like a cold like environment and like it like i think i've seen the inside doesn't it like a like a they they have like a s or isn't it like one of the rooms it like is a a triangle like a church on yeah yeah exactly and sound gets up and tells us what what the experience is gonna be it's like this is the hardest time you're gonna work you you know you better tell your friends and family that you're gonna go away for three months you can't help them move or all of that you just gotta be focused on on work so hi and i like to it very seriously okay i was like okay this these three months are are are very important for for the success of the company and we transformed the product in these three months they went from a simple sort of editor output to a place where you can host applications and build real things in and all in three months and were working you know twelve hour thirteen hour days and and and it was it was only three of us at a time our first employee actually was was sort of a runaway kid he grew up in california little down down and and he didn't wanna go to school and so he leaves his home he goes to hack reactor and and he becomes he becomes a programmer and he was eighteen he was looking for a job i knew the guys at hacker actor the use rep blood and i'm like send me your best programmer and he's like look this kid his little awkward but he's the best and so he comes out nails has on our interview music to my ears yeah and basically i like him because you know it it mirrors kind of my life story a little bit where is this guy now but we got them we got him some liquidity after six years of working i felt that's the right thing to do and because he was kinda burnt out and didn't wanna continue so i i called my i called my brother in jordan i'm like look you gotta you gotta come out here when i see you need to and he's a program i taught him programming when he was a kid and i was like you gotta you gotta come come help us and he's still was today and i called my friend from c academy moody he's stole with us today as well and like you got you gotta help us like like you know you could do it remotely and so we assemble like a team of of five people essentially and so we we go really hard and we were like one of the hottest companies in yc at the time and can you give some sense of the scale of it now like you know i invested in it like a year ago or so two years ago or something like i don't know when but the numbers were off the you had user growth first your graph looked like a hockey stick because you zoom out and you you you you you it ignores all of the little like years where nothing was really going on but you have this crazy growth but the crazy thing about it is that your growth was developers so it's like you know one developer user is worth i don't know ten twenty times just like a normal internet user mh but you had this crazy hockey stick growth of developers can you talk about can you just say a couple of like permission to brag can you say a couple of brag worthy stats that would impress us yeah so so rep was very easy to get start with and so people would start start call using it in college or or high school and continue using it for many years and so it was sticky for especially junior developers when they're starting out and and it was it was spreading honestly like word mouth you know there was a viral component to it people can share url and then suddenly you're in the same environment as them right like and then we have this like multiplier quoting experience and so people who were collaborating and and also covid was really great for us because we were i think the only collaborative editor experience on the web at the time and so a lot of people were remote and and needed something to work with the with each other and so rep was adopted at the time and so the the the gross was was off the chart and the service were going down and the marginal user any web app is sort of like zero zero cost but for us it was you know we we try to optimize it a lot but it was still on the order of like one to five dollars like a month and you know the the growth was off the charts but i i you know have to admit it was hard to monetize at the time because developers are actually not used to pay for things now they kind of are paying for things because of ai but at this time they they weren't don't paying and then you know as as we added limits and things like that that they thought like they they can like move on and set up their own developer environment and so it took took a lot of you know creative thinking to figure out how to charge for people and ultimately ai was the thing that that people are paying for and the reason is like the productivity benefit of ai is like it's like obvious and and people like okay this saves me time and makes me about a developer and i said people are paying for it right now well can you give any indication on how many users or how many how much revenue the business is you know sign ups we we have like more than thirty million i think thirty five million users right now in terms of active users it kinda of fluctuates but you know three you know two to three million a a month probably a hundred thousand apps hosted hosted and rep because you can build an app and and and deploy it all in in one environment in terms of revenue i can't share right now but like especially this year it's been like exponential growth sam check this out this agent thing i show you this so you you haven't used this right sam alright so so watch so yesterday i was like i'm i'm gonna mess around i was doing research for this but i was i i just got like sucked into replicate it and i started doing that stopped doing research so i go and i i go to rep and it's changed because now when you before when you would go it would be like here's a coding screen with a blinking cursor and it's like write some code and i'd be like oh cool i don't really write code so i don't know how to use this product exactly maybe i could learn the code maybe i could you know pay somebody did to build something on here but whatever i was stuck so now you open up outlet rep and it just it's like chad gb it just goes so what would you like me to create and so i go on there watch this so i go i'll give you the exact prompt i said build me an app that will text me every morning asking how i hate yesterday let me answer via a text message and then track the results on a monthly calendar grid if texting doesn't work you could also use whatsapp or something else okay so basically like on the right here is just like the chat and it just goes absolutely let me propose what we'll build and then it just kinda like explains to me like a project manager it goes i'm gonna help you create a food tracking app through sms messaging with a account visualization we'll start with the sms later we can add whatsapp as an alternative it's like okay okay prioritizing things that's interesting and then it goes the apple and daily message blah blah blah and then it goes how would you like your proceed and it's like there was like you know add more features change the instructions or like go ahead and build the prototype i build the initial prototype and then literally i don't know if you could see this but like it starts like auto scrolling as it's writing code like this is all just a code it's generating so like you know like i'm not doing anything i'm literally sitting back with popcorn while this is happening so it's like here's your calendar grid and it's like hey i need i'm gonna use twilio for the sms it decides i'll use twilio the sms can you go to twilio and give me your account and your phone number so that it'll we like we use twilio for sending sms so i go to twilio i'll give it my sms and then it's like it's made it literally made the thing exactly how i will works now yeah i actually got stuck on the twilio step because twilio has to verify my phone number so it like it hasn't verified yet but i can go into i in twilio i see it tries to send me the message and it's just as awaiting twilio verification to be able to use this so i'm like a little bit stuck there which is like a common thing with agents i feel it's like almost absolutely incredible and then kind of frustrating at some point or where you have to like you know find through some walls well i think i'm to tweet you i think he said i want people to be able to build an app faster than they could just google the answer to a question and that's exactly what happened here less insane so this screenshot is the agent looking at the result it's trying to verify this this is not the running app if you could click on you can it's says the top took a screenshot and it shows it to me was like hey is this how you want it and i was like oh because before it had it where it was like not the right month on i oh put the month on top like don't say monthly food tracker tracking right december and then it also said like hey would you like any other style improvements i can make it broader i could change the color scheme and i'm like dude this is literally better than an employee right like first it's instantaneous second i could you know i don't have to pay to pay somebody to sit in the desk to sit around waiting for me do something i had a idea on a whim go to rep and did the thing it with the agent it this was a like there's been a few like mind blowing moments for me in my like tech career you know like i graduated twenty ten so i'll start at that point where it's like the first time i took an uber i was like holy shit that was amazing i pushed a button a car showed up the guy got i didn't even have to pay for i it just paid through my phone that was magic and i could see you i could see him on an app getting closer and closer to the restaurant that was like one of them you know chat gp for sure was another where i could just you know tell it to make something and write something in write it for me this is another one of them is the first ai agent thing that has like been a mind blowing moment for me where i am not a programmer i am not a code but i can now create software this is like amazing can i ask a blunt crude question how can i use your software to become a billionaire there because like i see this and like you you know like the the the ridiculous analogy that i use is i'm like i feel like an artist sometimes where like i feel like i have the ability to conceptualize certain things but i can't paint it's like a kept fucking paint what i want to paint that's in my head like because i literally don't have that skill set sometimes it's so like i'll be working on stuff like dude i want this to do this but i gotta go talk to this developer and i don't wanna have this conversation and that's just like a pain in the ass it's so like you basically are making it so i can finally express myself easily i like how you're on the first date you're like how can i get you to take the clothes off you're like how do i use your thing to get really rich yeah i mean that's basically like like and you had on the document you're like here's just here's the opportunities just use rep to do x y and z i and i i wanna go through that because this is like amazing this is actually you know there's like there's like the viral clip on youtube or twitter like at all a bunch of places where it's like the the headline which we probably have used which is like billion dollar one person companies or something like this you're the closest person to this probably to that question to answer that question yeah so there are apps built on a rep agent that otherwise would take probably a hundred thousand dollars of of developer time and and you can build it like in you know twenty five dollars paid paid to rep i will say that there there's limitations right it it is not it is not perfect this is like the worst it's it's it's gonna be it it sometimes get stuck with problems you can you you need to have some skill in prompting to coax it to like figure it out and it sort of like teaches you over time because it tells you what it's doing as it's editing the code and so over time you're learning how to use you're actually learning how code works to learning how maybe you're not learning how to exactly type code but you're learning the different components in where things could go wrong you're learning about database we have like database you can go in and look at the tables and look oh what's happening and so you know the vision for this is that that's all you need that's all you need to build an entire startup and you know every day we're inch entering towards that you know i and i i talked about like pushing the boulder up up the hill and i think that's one of my one of my talents is like okay what are the problems that you can make progress on every day and every week such that you know in a year time you have this exponential progress and the product is is so much better the other thing is we're writing this wave of the foundation models getting better so every time they get better we plug in of a new foundation model and the product is is suddenly better so you're writing this you know two exponential curves which is like the engineering we're doing but also the underlying models on infrastructure is is is getting better so i i think in a in a year's time it's gonna be really mind blowing in a couple years time i think we're gonna see stories like someone getting super rich making an app and rep that that sort of goes viral and so we're we're adding stripe integration right now you can you can already use kind of stripe on on rep but we're adding integration that makes it super easy to start monetizing your app so so sam said how do get rich aid here like disclaimer it's not fully there yet but now you still have to answer the question i mean the question is like what kind of applications is it's like what are the ideas what kind of applications you can build i would say ai applications are are growing really fast like the revenue ramp in some of those ai applications is kinda crazy can you can you tell the story of magic school i thought this was really interesting yeah so magic school is like an ai application for educators it's it's basically like helping them use foundation models and all to do their work to do assignments for for kids to have an interactive like ai experience and so it's like a full suite of ai for educators the guy who created it is a was a teacher right the guy who created was a teacher he took some time during covid to to learn how to code and he started using rep and him and and i think and another person built the initial thing totally on rep and because we can go for an idea all the way to deployment and and immediately started growing like you know peep these ai apps like when when the adoption starts happening it goes super viral you don't need a a ton of marketing and the revenue ramp was was one of the craziest ones i've seen especially for education yeah it was like a known thing it was like hardest thing you can do sell in into schools into teachers they're over overworked they're under underpaid that they don't have the time to like figure out your new tool but this thing is great so if you if you go to it it's basically like because teacher spends a lot of their time not in the classroom it's after after school is done they have to grade papers they have to create the lesson plan for the next day they have to create the quizzes or the multiple choice tests and they have to like so they have to constantly do this and there was these platforms like teacher pay teachers where i could just if i don't wanna make it myself because i'm tired after the school day i might be able to go buy one for nine bucks from another teacher who teaches fifth grade science in some other state and i would take that and i would would buy it that way what magic school did was it was like cool generate a you just say like i wanna i teach you know fifth grade biology i wanna do a pop quiz about you know how this how my toast works and then it'll basically create either a lesson plan or a quiz or you know a a a student like interactive like you know workbook that they need to create or whatever and so it lets a teacher not have to spend you know four hours a night creating the materials that they need just to teach class because ai can do it for them and this thing looks i i don't know these guys i don't know anything about them but it says you know over four million educators are using this which are four million educators and their students which i don't i don't know if they're counting if you go on similar web they have millions of monthly unique so that's like really a big i think they raise like twenty million bucks too options i don't think a pretty huge signal so they they launched and like i wanna say july twenty twenty three so they're like a little over over a year and do you know that these like saas metrics are like how long to get to whatever like hundred million or whatever the ai apps and i would say magic school always on that trajectory is like just like that you know the the curve is like you know all the way straight up this is kinda weird but maybe this is like a feature of yours that you helped this company become potentially one of the faster growing companies of all time and you only earn twenty dollars a month from that yeah so so so rep had you know always a problem of of value capture possibly that's why like vc struggles with it for a long time so that there's some logic for why why it is hard to monetize these things and like capture some of the value i will say you know i invested in magic school so there's some of that and with ai i think we're gonna be able to you know you know capture at least a little bit more of that value if people are monetizing these apps on rep v via the agent there's a way i think where we can potentially take a a cut out of that especially if we make it like super simple to start monetizing an app and and and also like if once we reach scale you know it is like chat like you don't need a lot of skill to do that and it's gonna get easier and easier once we reach scale and you have you know millions of people paying for this and it's not just like twenty bucks you're gonna pay incremental after you finish your credits so we give you monthly credits and then afterwards if you wanna continue you can like buy more credits are there other companies like magic school like cool companies like that you've seen that maybe we haven't heard of that are using ai yes so you you know i'm i'm very excited about agents right now and you know i i think i i predicted earlier this year on a on a podcast that you know this this gonna be the year where like agents are born and next year is like where agents are are against scale so there's this company called eleven acts and eleven acts creates ai sdr str and so basically you don't need to hire as the like there are some companies that feel like you know they can they can bootstrap their sales without sdr you can have like one a and that a account executive is like running these like tens of ai sdr rs and and the revenue ramp on eleven acts was also crazy it is pretty wild how fast these companies are scaling i don't think it into history of silicon valley we've sent anything like even in the like web two point o era so what is like a fast ramp for ai for an maybe not eleven x specifically but just for an ai company what's like what's what's impressive that kinda broke the frame of what how long things would take but you've seen it now not yeah so i i would say reaching a ten million in three to four months arr are oh my god that's wild yeah we i invested in that jasper which was like one of the early kind of chat gp wrapper type of companies where they was like hey like marketing you know you need to write a blog post you need to write a description for a product or whatever and so you could use it for writing any kind of marketing copy and they're graph was i've never seen it that it was like in ten months or eleven months they scaled like fifty million in and recurring revenue it it was like i've never seen anything even remotely close to that it was it brought up a question like is this sustainable is this like what what is happening here like this is i'm just doesn't compute but it definitely broke my frame of what is possible because i've been working you know in silicon valley since you know two thousand eleven eleven twelve and that just that wasn't a thing you you would never see a graph like that what are some other companies that i've gotten to that like ten ish or ten ish million or similar trajectory in three month type of businesses yeah so this is i i wanted to kind of give a just you know sort of a disclaimer about this which is the big question in the investor community right now is like the the mo question and that that started around the time that chad kind of came out and there was these gp wrappers sort of this candace condescending anyway of of looking at a lot of these companies like if you can create gp wrapper you know in in in a month that then you know a lot of other people will create gp wrappers in a month and you're gonna be competing on on price and the margins go down and yes the arr is great but you're it's but ant topic is capturing or or or ai capturing most of there hard not you you're kind of a you're kind of like a middleman middle man and you're gonna have like a hard time having having margins and and i think it's it's totally valid question now i think you know mo develop over time through strategy and technical excellence so i mean some of these companies can go down pretty fast and there examples of that right now but but i think if you you know you can have you can start building technical like with a rep again this like idea of like pushing a ball a hell you know we have this run runtime environment we have like this infrastructure we have the deployment we have databases we have all these integrations i mean it's the only one in the world that is like an end to end environment to to make software and like to catch up with that it it's gonna take years right but technical advantage is also not a long term moat and so so again it's a big question i don't think it's answer yet ad know there there's strategic things you could do if you reach scale if the switching costs are high you know that that may be like a way to to have sustainable modes but but it is definitely a big question you know it's crazy sean like for the long i i hate using the d word democrat i think that's like such an overused like someone can valley do it don't do it but this is actually one of those fusing few examples where like for the longest time building a website or a web app like you just literally couldn't and so now you are making the technology that everyone can do it and so what i think is like guys like sean and me or people like us who have an audience it's like why don't we just why aren't we like constantly launching like companies using this technology because like our ability to get users because we just get on the microphone and talk about it that's like actually a competitive advantage whereas being technical is no longer it's still an advantage but it's not as much as before it's like getting customers now is actually the only hard part which is still hard but it's way easier of your popular yeah so so you know the the playbook i would use is like i would go into some inefficient market or industry so a deal from from magic school went into this hugely inefficient you know industry which is which is you know schools and education and by the way by way another product is synthesis tutor which is which is also going going viral right now and and and and they they they they have also this revenue ramp that's kinda crazy both sean and i invested in in that company think all yeah yeah and and for a while they they had like this this thing where like you know they had they had educators on the payroll and and whatever they replaced all of that with ai now like you know the kids sit in front of the the ipad and they're talking to the ai and like learning really fast and it's much better than the previous product right so basically like find an industry where you're familiar with and just like build the jeep wrapper to like automate some of the work there and like you you could do it like a hundred times and one of them will take off yeah it's the era of the idea guy now it's our turn it's our turn to shine right because now the limits and the the kind of the the value creation is do you understand a problem well enough to know how to take this really powerful magic wand and point it at that problem and be able to make that more efficient and then of course do all of the other hard things go get customers make it sustainable built a good team and do all the the normal entrepreneurship stuff but it seems like more than ever having a great idea is the kinda like key unlock to doing these things because building has become easier and i'll give you kind of my my personal epiphany that i had while i was doing this so i invested in rep mostly when i just thought you seemed really smart and i saw a growth curve of developers using it and i thought oh cool like i've experienced this problem before like a one stop place where i can come in write the code host it all all the all the stuff you talked about like don't have to download java i don't have to do any of that shit i that that that appealed depends time i think actually in the same way that synthesis like took ai and actually almost like really like ten x the value prop of the business i think you guys are in the same so here's my my quick pitch which is now that i think of rep as like basically what shopify was for creating you know like i'm online stores i think rep is that for creating software so to me you guys are it is eyes right when you you shopify for software so like i'll give you my example i recently celebrated a milestone that was both i was proud of it and really embarrassed also so a few years ago i started a e commerce brand and we just crossed fifty million in revenue like kinda like cumulative lifetime revenue half of it was like you know this year but but fifty million total and i was like wow like fifty million that's great like that's i had never created a business that had done fifty million in revenue so that was like a personal pride point at the same time i was telling it to to to a friend of mine who who's not an entrepreneur he's like yeah man i would love to learn how to you know like make websites and like make products and manufacturing and i was like oh i don't know how to do any of that like i was i was like this this brand that is on a fifty million in revenue for me i don't i just stacked alibaba time shopify i've never manufactured a product in my life still don't know how to and i've never made a website that's like you know actually used by customers still don't know how to but i was able to i was able to skip all the work and get to the brand part like do the thing where we created a product that people liked and you know it's a successful company now and i thought wow rep gonna do that for the software space and i was like it used to be that the job was software engineer and now it's gonna be software creator it's like i can be a creator of software without being a programmer myself company that little shift is a big shift because the way i think about it i don't know how many developers there are i think github has like a hundred million or two hundred million accounts so i'll just use that like there's two hundred million dollars let's say developer you know software engineers in the world well now there's gonna be two hundred two billion people that can create software because if you got the internet you got your phone you can create software now you guys tell the agent make me an app does this make a tool that does this and so you ten x the number of people that can create software in the same way that shopify and alibaba ten x or more the number of people who could create products and go sell them like hard goods that's how i see what you're doing yeah so so you know even at the start of rep you know there's our initial seed deck and the duck kind of has this il musk style like you know a master master plan and it was like we we build a you know we build a platform we grow it and then ai is gonna make the thing a lot more accessible because our mission was make program accessible then we updated mission it was create a billion programmers and then so the moment that you know you know even g three came out i was like this is this is a thing and i wrote this thread on twitter about how ai agents will just change how program is work this is a deck twenty fifteen this is i don't even know if open ai was a research lab at that time maybe yeah definitely you know there was no chat but this was your master planned deck so we're gonna grow by building tools for teachers and students we're gonna build a simple network and ai assisted interface that blur the distinction between learning and building if all of in a platform where people can learn build explore host applications like talking about ai back in twenty fifteen in your in your actual pitch deck dude it's also clear how c academy was highly influential to you because i remember years ago sean said everyone tries to learn how to code i used code academy and it was a pretty cool interface and it's very similar to what you're describing you know at some point i kind of lost hope in in courses because like know we have a hundred days of code we're telling users that to use our application you need you need to invest a hundred days and that's kinda crazy like there there isn't any like successful company in the world you need a hundred days to learn it and and so that's when i kind of changed my mindset and i said okay it needs to be chad like it needs to be just a prompt and we started building that earlier this year and and now that's all we're focused on we wanna create new programmers you know existing developers great they have a lot of tools but we wanna we wanna go after the citizen developer right everyone is a developer and i think that's you know that's what what you're talking about you go from like a hundred million developers of the world well i think it it oversees the numbers is it's probably more thirty million and then you ten x that and so what what does the world look like when anyone with an idea could could make something and one of my favorite books is to sovereign individual the thing i really was excited about is this idea of ideas become wealth and so you no longer have the bottleneck of making something that's where we're headed and this is what you're talking about sean is as like the the it's it's the time for idea guy and and like maybe that's you know tongue and cheek and like maybe the way to to talk about it in more precise terms is that people who can find these gaps in in markets people who have expertise in certain areas that they can tell their there's inefficiency and they can like create a ai application that can immediately plug that like i saw this video on twitter the other day it was a of a snake that got its head chopped off and it like floated around and bit the a bit like the tail of its own body and then like the body like reacted your employees are they thinking that the they're sort of doing that to themselves where they're like like when you make jokes dark or like we're would you like talk like you know like you don't need to hire all these programmers to do all this stuff are they like sitting there with their hands of their pocket like like does that mean us you know i i always wanted the company to be super lean and so for a long time we're like ten people but like now we're like seventy people that's still nothing yeah so so i i i'd rather not hire a lot more people because i think that again the efficiency for programmers so look citizen developers are gonna go from zero to like say ten x but also existing software engineer are gonna go from ten x to hundred x right and so and so they're gonna be become more and more productive the moment we we automate all of software engineering i think that's sort of like the moment of ag ai so i think it's like a little far away and the reason i say this is because once you automate software then the agents can rebuild themselves and you go into this into this loop of you know increased intelligence every version builds us its next version builds this next version and so this is what the call intelligence explosion that would lead to the singularity right so it's like a pretty crazy time when we automate all of software engineering and so i i i think i think it's coming i don't know if it's ten years or fifteen years but i think that's the time where the world leading radically changes have you met anybody in kind of the tech industry that blew you away either personally or maybe read about them maybe met friend of a friend told you a story because i saw a picture of you with jensen you know you've met paul graham i know that you're like connected in the ai circle you met son sam alt in addition to building the tech i love the characters and i love the stories is why every you know elon snippet of how he runs his companies goes viral and shit like that what are your favorite kind of inspiring stories or crazy stories that you'd you've either experienced directly or or red yeah one of the carriers sorting when we're raising from a sixteen z mark invites me to to breakfast at like ten am at his house and so so i go there and i expect like i'm gonna talk about the business and so we we spend like two or three hours talking about politics and the world and like all sorts of things that are interesting to it to him and i thought like this guy is like is like more than just a he's like a philosopher and so right now he's he's going out and he's talking about this stuff like his gerald an interview went super viral and he's been always have like these interesting ideas about about the world and the interesting thing about a sixteen z is his partner ben is is sort of like the executor sort of the executive right he wrote the heart thing about hard things where like he teaches you like about what it means to run a company it's painful it's hard and what it means to hire executives so what means to scale a company and so so you you have this this duo of like the do and the like the philosopher and and i think i think that's really amazing and and i think they're they're they have really big plans and and get started i would just hate the philosopher like are you gonna do anything but what are you talking with politics for right now it's gotta be the worst to be the doe and the du philosopher right i you know i i think i think sam is is it was interesting to to kind of meet him talk to him because he's very he's very effective like he like the first time i met i met him like maybe not the first time but like he was on his computer as as i am talking and so i'm talking was like we're fundraising i went to to talk to you know asics and z i'm like really big fan of of mark and he was typing her computer okay i introduce you to mark and and and then you know when when you send sam emails it's like pretty quickly replies with with like a you know a couple of words like a couple sentences so i saw how effective and fast you can be and that that i'm i'm not like that you know i'm trying to be more like that but i'm someone who really values the the quiet like to think about ideas and to think about strategy and things like that so i'm not always in top of communication it actually makes me like a little you know it it's overwhelming but but but i think i think seeing these people at least you know inspired me to be a little more like that you you tweeted out the story that i loved about you said the most gangster story in silicon valley steve jobs buying pixar for five million investing fifty million and operating at a loss for a decade so much so that he had to cut personal checks to make payroll and somehow turning it around to a seven billion dollar exit why why did you like that story you know i i there are people who are are over overrated in silicon like valley and i think there are be people who are underrated like i think people think about steve jobs in terms of like yeah the flashy things the iphone ipod you know coming in stage and and doing that the thing i like about the c job story is when he was lost in the desert for ten years so he left he was fired from apple and then he created two companies that were failing the whole time like next computing next computers and pixar were little literally failing like they didn't do anything yeah know they they weren't selling he was just like investing more and more of his money like i think he was gonna go broke but he kept going for ten years like how do you do that and and you know i'm a person who know like we talked about my story where i'm wanna be able to go the distance i think going the distance is is is an advantage for for entrepreneurs and pixar became usually value of a company and it goes from making no revenue to to making billions of dollars and going public over over a couple years and next next next computers saved apple apple was having a problem with os like intel you know they had the chip before i don't know they made it internally or something like that and then everyone was moving to intel intel was the best computing chip and they wanted their computers to be fast and so they need a new operating system and they try to buy they they went into the market they try to acquire company they kind of find a great operating system and next computing had the had had a great offering operating system and that became macos us so they they bought i didn't know that i thought next was just a failure i didn't didn't even realize it actually i thought they just bought steve back aqua hire but it wasn't an aqua it wasn't just aqua acquire no i mean objective c for example you know next computing was really obsessed with this idea of object oriented programming and they innovated a lot on what that means and you know it is based on uni but it has a lot of interesting features on on top of that so app they it saved apple because apple was otherwise not gonna be competitive without these new chips right well dude i know we kept you half an hour over i apologize for that but this was amazing this was one of my favorite episodes in a long time and i'm not just saying that you can go check all the other offices i don't say that at the end so this was awesome thanks so much for coming on where should people twitter is the best place to follow you yeah twitter amos amazon don't on twitter and and the rep handle and on twitter as well was just just our p dude thank you very much you're the best of course of course my my pleasure i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a goal less travel never looking back